I sat for an on-campus internship for an SDE role at Microsoft.

The preliminary round consisted of an online coding test which had 3 questions to be solved in 90 minutes. They were pretty easy (Kadane's algorithm, easy-medium LeetCode).

I was selected for 1:1 interviews.

Round 1 was just to check whether the candidate could code and explain the time complexity and be able to optimize the code. I was given an easy problem on string manipulation.

Round 2 was when things got serious. I was questioned on my resume, previous internships, and projects for about 20-25 minutes. After that, I was given a grid path finding algorithm (application of BFS, DFS). There were a few extra conditions and it also required printing the path, etc. I wrote a BFS approach. The interviewer asked for some runs on hypothetical data. I was also asked for the time complexities of BFS and DFS approaches and if one of them was better than the other. The interviewer seemed satisfied.

I was offered the SDE Intern role some hours later (yeah, just 2 rounds).

Given an n*m grid, you enter the grid at some cell in the first row and leave the grid at some cell in the nth (last) row.

Every cell has four directional parameters, indicating whether the cell in that direction can be visited.

Print the shortest possible path.